How to find information in the Pacific Archive of Digital Data for Learning & Education PADDLE collection

There are 5 ways to find information in this collection:

search for particular words

access publications by title

access publications by author

access publications by subject

access publications by country

You can search for particular words that appear in the text from the "search" page. This page can be reached from other pages by clicking the Search menu item.

You can access publications by title by clicking the Titles A-Z menu item. This brings up a list of documents in alphabetical order.

You can access publications by author by clicking the Authors A-Z menu item. This brings up a list of documents, sorted by author name.

You can access publications by subject by clicking the Subjects menu item. This brings up a list of subjects in alphabetical order.

You can access publications by country by clicking the Countries menu item. This brings up a list of countries represented by an interactive map. Clicking the flag of a pacific island nation will bring up documents associated with that nation.

How to read the documents

When you have arrived at any listing of documents, you are presented with two different ways of looking at the documents:

Each document opens in a new window.Note that a textual view of each document is available from the document information page.

How to search for particular words

From the search page, you make a query in these simple steps:

Specify what items you want to search

Type in the words you want to search for

Click the Begin Search button

When you make a query, the titles of twenty matching documents will be shown. There is a button at the end to take you on to the next twenty documents. From there you will find buttons to take you on to the third twenty or back to the first twenty, and so on. To view the document click the [ original document ] link.

A maximum of 100 is imposed on the number of documents returned. You can change this number by clicking the preferences button at the top of the page.

Search terms

Whatever you type into the query box is interpreted as a list of words called "search terms." Each term contains nothing but alphabetic characters and digits. Terms are separated by white space. If any other characters such as punctuation appear, they serve to separate terms just as though they were spaces. And then they are ignored. You can't search for words that include punctuation.

For example, the query

Forum Basic Education Action Plan (2001)

will be treated the same as

Forum Basic Education Action Plan 2001

Query type

You may query for some of the words. Just list some terms that are likely to appear in the documents you are looking for. Documents are displayed in order of how closely they match the query. When determining the degree of match,

the more search terms a document contains, the closer it matches;

rare terms are more important than common ones;

short documents match better than long ones.

Use as many search terms as you like—a whole sentence, or even a whole paragraph. If you specify only one term, documents will be ordered by its frequency of occurrence.

Scope of queries

In most collections you can choose different indexes to search. For example, there might be author or title indexes. Generally, the full matching document is returned regardless of which index you search.

If documents are books, they will be opened at the appropriate place.

Search for a phrase

You may search for a phrase by enclosing your search terms in quotes, for example:

"gender equality"

Search preferences

Two pairs of buttons control the kind of text matching in the searches that you make. The first set (labeled "case differences") controls whether upper and lower case must match. The second ("word endings") controls whether to ignoreword endings or not.

For example, if the buttons ignore case differences andignore word endings are selected, the query

Educational system

will be treated the same as

education systems

because the uppercase letter in "Educational" will be transformed to lowercase, and the suffixes "al" and "s" will be removed from "Educational" and "systems" respectively.